The follow-up for this week’s activity is to post at least two additional annotations in the Klings article making connections to the ideas from the Norman and the Zuckerman articles discussing 1.) the need for a field like Social Informatics and 2.) the need for a new kind of educational program to better prepare professionals ready to participate in this field.
Make sure to highlight the 2 annotations on Klings article regarding these questions
The Information Society, 23:
205
–220, 2007
ISSN: 0197-2243 print / 1087-6537 online
DOI: 10.1080/01972240701441556
What Is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter?
Rob Kling
School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Originally published in D-Lib Magazine, January,
1999. Available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/kling/
01kling.html. Reprinted with permission.
1. INTRODUCTION
A serviceable working conception of “social informatics”
is that it identifies a body of research that examines the
social aspects of computerization. A more formal defi-
nition is “the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses
and consequences of information technologies that takes
into account their interaction with institutional and cultural
contexts.”
It is a field that is defined by its topic (and fundamen-
tal questions about it) rather than by a family of methods,
much like urban studies or gerontology. Social informat-
ics has been a subject of systematic analytical and critical
research for the last 25 years. This body of research has
developed theories and findings that are pertinent to un-
derstanding the design, development, and operation of us-
able information systems, including intranets, electronic
forums, digital libraries, and electronic journals.
Unfortunately, social informatics studies are scattered
in the journals of several different fields, including com-
puter science, information systems, information science,
and some social sciences. Each of these fields uses some-
what different nomenclature. This diversity of communi-
cation outlets and specialized terminologies makes it hard
for many nonspecialists (and even specialists) to locate
important studies. It was one impetus for coining a new
term—social informatics—to help make these ideas ac-
cessible to nonspecialists, as well as to strengthen commu-
nication among specialists, and to strengthen the dialogs
between communities of designers and social analysts.
This article discusses some key ideas from social in-
formatics research and ends with a brief discussion of the
character of the field today. Readers who wish to under-
stand social informatics by learning about its origins and
influences may wish to start in that later section and then
return to the beginning for a more substantive focus. This
article serves as a brief introduction to social informatics
for information technology professionals and researchers,
and includes numerous references to help interested read-
ers readily locate more comprehensive resources.
2. PUNDITRY ABOUT INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGIES AND SOCIAL CHANGE
There are alternatives to systematic research about infor-
mation technologies and social change. Wired Magazine’s
articles often illustrate one popular alternative—vivid pun-
ditry. In the January 1998 issue, journalist George Gilder
wrote about the way that computing power has increased
a hundred millionfold since the 1950s. Computer scientist
Danny Hillis wrote about the ways that computerization
is leading to a transformation of a new civilization in a
few paragraphs and with high spirits. This kind of opin-
ionated journalism is very readable. Wired is colorful, both
in its prose as well as its typography, and it lends itself to
new sound bites. Unfortunately, it doesn’t lead to the kind
of deep understanding that many information technology
professionals need.
Wired exemplifies the magazines that offer energetic
prose, but information technology pundits, such as Esther
Dyson, communicate in many other forums as well, such
as their own books and conference talks. Pundits play in-
teresting social roles. The best pundits are entertaining,
provocative, and timely. If an issue arises this week, they
can rapidly formulate an articulate opinion, and perhaps
even a sound bite. In simplifying, they often oversimplify
and polarize issues. Unfortunately, the typical pundit re-
lies upon anecdotes and bold assertions, rather than using
them as entry points for analysis. Pundits usually rely upon
their own experience as a basis for expertise and don’t en-
courage serious and systematic research into information
technology and social life (see Nimmo & Combs, 1992).
Professionals are sometimes involved in very prosaic
work in designing information systems, selecting and
configuring equipment and developing policies and prac-
tices about the use of the resulting systems (i.e., which
data to collect and archive, how to identify authorized
users, how to organize training and consulting). The de-
tails of this development work differs substantially for
205
206 R. KLING
systems as varied as claims management for an insur-
ance company, a litigation support system for a law firm,
and a public-access online library of self-help medical
bulletins supported by a public health agency. However,
social informatics researchers have developed some fun-
damental ideas that can help improve professional prac-
tice and that pertain to a diverse array of information
systems.
The design and configuration of information systems
that work well for people and help support their work,
rather than make it more complicated, is a subtle craft.
Good application design ideas are neither obvious nor
effective when they are based on technological consid-
erations alone. Their formulation requires understanding
how people work and what kind of organizational prac-
tices obtain. However, many managers and professionals
often advance simple criteria to help guide computeriza-
tion strategies, such as:
1. Use more advanced technology (whether it is faster
or easier to use);
2. Use “better technologies,” (though there are differ-
ent criteria for “better” such as less expensive or
compatible with other equipment); or
3. Organize systems so that they are more efficient.
There are other guidelines, such as replacing repetitive
human activity with computer systems or devising com-
puter systems to leverage an organization’s value chain.
These kinds of context-free guidelines have not been good
enough to help information technology professionals de-
sign or implement effective systems.
Their limitations will be illustrated by the examples that
I develop in the following sections. Before I launch into
a discussion of some interesting ideas from social infor-
matics research, I will discuss one important phenomenon
that helps sets the stage for the importance of social in-
formatics for information technology professionals—“the
productivity paradox.”
3. THE PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX
Between 1960 and 1980, computer use and productivity
gains were linked together—in the writings of economists,
in the advertisements for new computer systems, and even
in the expectations of many working people who feared
that widespread computerization could lead to a society
with massive unemployment. As the costs of acquiring
computers rapidly declined, many North American orga-
nizations, public and private, increased their investments
in computerized systems. In the late 1980s, U.S. firms
were spending approximately half of their capital funds
on computers and telecommunications. Economists no-
ticed that national statistics for labor productivity were
not steadily increasing, and some managers noticed that
large investments in PCs did not seem to translate into
major productivity boosts.
Since the late 1980s, the U.S. business press has trum-
peted the expectations that computerization would soon
lead to productivity spurts and also published stories that
dash such hopes. A set of stories from Business Week il-
lustrates the conflicting themes in the business press. In
February 1994, Business Week published two short articles
by Gene Koretz: “Computers May Really Be Paying Off:
Effect of Automation on Productivity in the Workplace”
and “And They’re Giving the U.S. a Nice Competitive
Edge.” In January 1995, Business Week published a short
article by Dean Foust, “Is the Computer Boost That Big?
Computers Do Not Enhance Productivity Very Much.”
Economists also differed in their beliefs about the
relationship between computerization and productivity
growth. Many believed that technological innovation was
a major factor in national productivity and assumed that
investments in information technology would be reflected
in national statistics; when the cumulative capital stock
of computer systems was large enough, they would re-
sult in improved productivity statistics. Some economists
coined the term “productivity paradox,” after Nobel lau-
reate economist Robert Solow (1987) wrote, “You can see
the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statis-
tics.” Solow’s assertion counters the common assumption
that computerization would directly and dramatically im-
prove productivity. Economists were divided in their ex-
planations of the productivity paradox. Some believed that
their ways of measuring productivity were inadequate; oth-
ers argued that the capital stock of information technology
was still too small to have meaningful consequences in na-
tional economic statistics; and still others argued that lag
effects were being underestimated. Still others believed
that mismanagement was a root cause of the productivity
paradox.
The “productivity paradox” is also an important so-
cial phenomenon. Unfortunately, it is ignored in the
technophillic press, such as Wired Magazine, and is
glossed by most of the pundits. Within the United States,
annual economic productivity has been growing at a much
slower rate in the mid-1970s through the 1990s than in the
1960s. For example, labor productivity in nonfarm busi-
ness grew by 2.8% from 1960 to 1973 but grew by only
1.1% from 1973 to 1996 (Webb, 1998). While the spe-
cific rates of growth of labor productivity vary with the
years counted, and do vary within economic sectors, the
general pattern of reductions in measured labor productiv-
ity growth rates in the last two decades is well accepted
among economists.
Certainly many things have changed in industrial soci-
eties between the first 20-year period after World War II
and the most recent 20-year period. One set of changes
is the proliferation of, and the very deep investment in,
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 207
computer and telecommunication systems. Since the late
1980s, private firms in the U.S. have been investing about
half of their capital in information and communication
technologies. That investment includes telephone systems
and voice mail as well as computers. Still, it is a large frac-
tion, and it has been sustained since the “PC revolution.”
There has been a fairly intensive purchasing campaign, and
an increasing computerization campaign in major firms,
and it is beginning to show up in cumulative technology
investments on a significant scale.
This is the very period in which productivity gains are
not going up by a factor of a hundred million—the num-
ber that Gilder (1998) likes to give as the gain in comput-
ing value since the 1950s. In the U.S., labor productivity
has grown 2–4% per year in this period. Many people
have assumed that computerization should directly and
dramatically improve productivity. Newer computer and
telecommunication systems may offer many advantages
over traditional media or even older computerized systems.
However productivity gains may be hard to achieve with
the low-volume high-variety computer applications that
many professionals use. These may be called “productivity
tools,” but they may do more to help improve the appear-
ance of documents and presentations, to deepen analysis,
and to improve control over one’s work relationships—
especially with reduced secretarial support. These are
valuable gains, but they may not translate into “throughput
productivity.”
Some economists are concerned about these matters
and believe that the productivity paradox is primarily “not
real.” It will be resolved by improved ways to measure
productivity and actually a larger investment in computer
systems. There is a lively debate between economists and
organizational analysts (see Kling, 1996b). Organizational
analysts suggest explanations that range from “We haven’t
learned how to use computers well enough at an organiza-
tional and social scale” (King, 1996), through describing
many organizational processes and work practices that re-
duce productivity in practice (Attewell, 1996). Such work
practices include managers generating more numerous,
fine-grained reports from information systems, authors
making numerous interim drafts of manuscripts, people
fiddling with malfunctioning computer systems, and so
on. The managerial reports may help managers feel more
confident in taking certain actions, the incrementally re-
vised manuscripts may be improved, and so on. But these
practices don’t increase “throughput productivity.”
There are several social explanations for the produc-
tivity paradox: (a) Many organizations develop systems
in ways that lead to a large fraction of implementation
failures; or (b) few organizations design systems that ef-
fectively facilitate people’s work; or (c) we significantly
underestimate how much skilled work is required to ex-
tract value from computerized systems. Taken together,
these observations suggest that many organizations lose
potential value from the ways that they computerize.
Some recent studies indicate that information technol-
ogy investments have improved the productivity of some
organizations and national economies in the 1990s (Bryn-
jolfsson & Hitt, 1998; Dewan & Kraemer, 1998). However,
the firm-level data show substantial variation across firms
(Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1998, p. 52). The evidence is accu-
mulating that organizations that computerize intensively
with appropriate organizational practices are more pro-
ductive than the average, while those that do not organize
appropriately lag behind the firms that do not computerize
intensively. Brynjolfsson and Hitt (1998, p. 54) estimate
that the inappropriately organized, highly computerized
firms lag the appropriately organized, highly computer-
ized firms by 10%.
Resolving the productivity paradox lies in the future.
The productivity paradox gives us reason to believe that
current strategies of computerization do not readily pro-
duce expected economic and social benefits in a vast num-
ber of cases. In particular, technology alone, even good
technology alone, is not sufficient to create social or eco-
nomic value. This discussion offers an entry point into an
interesting set of studies and theories about the ways that
effective computerization depends upon close attention to
workplace organization and practices. I will discuss this
idea in greater depth later on.
4. EARLY RESEARCH IN SOCIAL INFORMATICS
Through the 1970s and 1980s, much of the social informat-
ics research focused on organizations because they were
the major sites of computerization. It is only in the last few
years that many people who are not themselves technical
specialists have gotten computer systems for home use.
The era of the Internet, or particularly public access to the
Internet, raises issues of work at home, communication at
home, entertainment, access to medical information, and
other personal uses. These are significant phenomena, but
are different from the topics I will emphasize. They are part
of social informatics, but they open up different lines of
analysis that warrant serious study and understanding (see,
for example, Anderson et al., 1995; Kahin & Keller, 1995).
In the 1970s and 1980s, often the questions about com-
puterization were phrased as deterministic impact ques-
tions, such as: “What would be the impact of computers
on organizational behavior if we did X?”; “What would be
the changes in social life if we did X?”; “Will computer
systems, for example, improve or degrade the quality of
work?” There are a number of studies in which people
try to answer this last question, whether work life would
improve for clerks, for engineers, for managers, and so
on. The questions were often phrased in very simple, di-
rect terms, namely: “What will happen, X or Y?” And the
208 R. KLING
answer was: “sometimes X, and sometimes Y.” There was
no simple, direct effect. Much of the character of changes
depended on the relative power of workers. For example,
clerks fared less well, on the average, than professionals.
But sometimes secretaries, who are the aristocrats of the
clerical class, were able to have greater improvements in
their work lives than were the people, primarily women,
who were doing transaction processing in the back rooms
of banks and insurance companies. Occupational power
played an important role in mediating and shaping the way
that computerization restructured workplaces (see Kling,
1980; Attewell, 1987; Iacono & Kling, 1987).
Other sets of questions were also examined. To what
extent were organizations centralized? There were ma-
jor arguments that computer systems would enable upper
managers to have much more detailed information about
the operations on workplaces, such as the shop floor, the
editorial room, and the classroom, and that organizations
would become more centralized. Others argued that they
would become more decentralized. Many people wanted to
know: “Well, which is it? Is it A or B?” Some studies found
that information technology use led to some organizations
centralizing, and other studies found that information tech-
nology use led to decentralization. Many of the arguments
which were engaged in a form of “Is it A or B?” were based
upon simple technological determinism that has not been
borne out in reviews of the careful studies (see King, 1983;
George & King, 1991). The analytical failure of techno-
logical determinism is one of the interesting and durable
findings from social informatics research.
Today some analysts (and many pundits) frame claims
about information technology in social life in deterministic
ways, with claims such as, “The Web means that the public
will get better information than ever before.” That fram-
ing is one that people who study social informatics would
be skeptical of. We ask: “When will the Web enable the
public to locate ‘better information’? Under what condi-
tions? Who? For what?” Are people seeking information
to help them make a better choice of doctors, and then
placing more trust in that doctor? Or are people seeking
alternatives to doctor-mediated medical care—whether in-
formation about health, herbal medicine, or postoperative
care? Those contingency questions don’t lend themselves
to lively sound bites. But they do yield a very nuanced pro-
fessional understanding. This kind of contextual inquiry il-
lustrates the ways that social informatics researchers frame
questions to develop an analytical understanding of infor-
mation technologies in social life.
5. SOME KEY IDEAS OF SOCIAL INFORMATICS
5.1 How Social Context Matters: Intranets in Action
One way to illustrate a contextual inquiry of information
technology in social life is to discuss some studies of the
ways consulting firms have adopted and used computer-
ized documentary systems.1 One major consulting firm,
PriceWaterhouse, bought 10,000 copies of Lotus Notes,
a documentary support system, for its staff in 1989. Lo-
tus Notes is superficially similar to an Internet-like system
with bulletin boards and posting mechanisms and discus-
sion groups and electronic mail for organizations. Depend-
ing upon how Notes is used, it can act as an e-mail system, a
discussion system, an electronic publishing system, and/or
a set of digital libraries.
PriceWaterhouse is an international consulting firm
with tens of thousands of employees worldwide, and about
10,000 of them are located in the United States. Their vice-
president of information systems believed that Lotus Notes
was such a powerful technology that it would sell itself,
that the main thing to do was to rapidly roll it out to the
consulting staff, and let them use it to find creative ways
to share information.
He was concerned that his firm employed thousands
of “line consultants” in different offices all over North
America, who work on similar problems and who rarely
share their expertise. Sometimes a consulting team in
Boston is dealing with the same kind of issue that a con-
sulting team in Toronto or San Francisco would be deal-
ing with, or very close. They had no easy way of sharing
their growing understanding of the problems they were
facing with their clients. Could the firm’s line consultants
use some kind of communication and computerized in-
formation system to store what they knew, and share it?
The first test was with the information technology staff.
They tended to use Notes; they found it interesting; and
they used it fairly aggressively for sharing information
about their own projects. PriceWaterhouse’s tax consul-
tants in Washington, DC, were another group that used
Lotus Notes (Mehler, 1992). These tax consultants studied
the behavior of the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S.
Congress, and disseminated tax advisories to PriceWater-
house offices around the country about shifting changes
in tax legislation that might affect their clients. These tax
consultants made substantial use of Lotus Notes to broad-
cast their tax advisories.
The line consultants were supposed to become Lotus
Notes’ primary users. The vice-president of information
technology felt that Notes was so revolutionary that people
didn’t even have to be shown how to use it; examples could
even stunt their imaginations. The consultants should sim-
ply be given an opportunity to use it, and they would learn
how to use it in creative ways. Orlikowski (1993) found
that the senior line consultants, who were partners in the
firm, tended to be modest users.2 The more numerous
junior line consultants, called associates, were low users.
They often seemed uninterested in learning how to use
Notes, readily gave up if they faced early frustrations with
Notes, and as a group did not spend much time with it.
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 209
Here we have a pattern of different groups in an organi-
zation having different practices in working with Notes.
How can we explain such differences?
One explanation focuses upon the incentive systems
in the firm. A good place to start our analysis is with the
associate consultants and the partners. PriceWaterhouse—
and many other large consulting firms in North America—
reviews its consultants through a demanding promotion
system. The associates are reviewed every 2 years, for “up
or out” promotions. In the first few rounds at major firms,
about half of the associates are fired at each review. In their
“up or out” system, the many associate consultants’ goals
are to be promoted to the status of partner. Consultants who
are promoted to the status of partners can expect annual
incomes over $300,000 at these major firms. Partnerships
are the golden ring that these firms use to motivate their
associate consultants.
The associates are valued for their billable hours, and
were effectively required to bill almost all of their time. As
they become more senior, their ability to attract new busi-
ness becomes more critical. “Billable hours” means they
have an account that they can charge their time to. Lotus
Notes, the revolutionary technology, was not provided to
them with a “training account” to bill their time to. Con-
sultants who wanted to use Notes had to have an account
to charge their time against, and the initial learning time
was in the order of 20 to 30 hours. In 1991, the consultants
were billed at about $150 an hour, so they had to find a
client who would be willing to pay $3,000 to $4,500 for
them to learn a system whose value wasn’t yet clear to
them (but that could be revolutionary). Many had trou-
ble justifying that amount of expenditure to any of their
clients at the time that they were participating in the Notes
rollout. There was a major question about what the con-
sultants would actually do with Notes after they learned
how to use it. Consequently, relatively few associates saw
value in Notes; there were no exemplary demonstrations
showing them how other successful line consultants used
Notes.
On the other hand, the partners had substantial job se-
curity (which was similar to university tenure). They could
afford to experiment with Notes. They were more willing
to invest some time to explore, often using e-mail, occa-
sionally developing and sending memos, and so on. This
case study contradicts the popular “Nintendo generation”
explanation: “In the future, we don’t have to train people
about computing, because the Nintendo kids (or the Net
kids) will learn quickly.” In this case, generally, younger
consultants had less incentive to learn Notes than did the
middle-aged and elderly partners.
But what about the information technology staff and
the tax consultants? These groups had a certain advantage
in their forms of job security. Many of the information
technology staff were technophiles who were willing to
work with an interesting new application. Lotus Notes has
been helpful for people who can invest time in learning
how to use it, especially when they have joint projects and
major motivations for communicating, for documenting
work, for sharing memos, and so on.
The tax consultants, who were located in Washington,
DC, had a significant incentive to show that they were visi-
ble and valuable in the firm. In their case, salary didn’t give
them an incentive, it gave them protection. Lotus Notes
allowed them to broadcast for visibility: It gave them the
ability, in effect, to electronically publish their advice and
make it quickly available to many of the consultants around
the firm who wanted to read the Notes database. They
hoped it would enhance their visibility, and thus show that
the Washington office was not just overhead, but an impor-
tant contributing part of the firm. In short, organizational
incentive systems were not part of the original marketing
story of Lotus Notes. The interesting information process-
ing features enabled by Lotus Notes were emphasized in
numerous stories in the technical press (see, for example,
Kirkpatrick, 1993.)
An organization, or organizational subunits with dif-
ferent incentive systems, might use Notes very differently.
The way that some consultants in Ernst and Young (E&Y),
another major consulting firm, use Notes is instructive
(Davenport, 1997; Gierkink & Ruggles, n.d.). In brief,
E&Y created an organization (Center for Business Knowl-
edge) whose charter was to organize E&Y’s consultants’
know-how in specific high profile areas. By 1997, E&Y
had developed 22 distinct social cross-office networks of
consultants with expertise in certain industries, organiza-
tional reforms, or technologies that were a focus of E&Y’s
business.
Each network was assigned a half-time person to cod-
ify in Notes databases the insights from specific consulting
projects, to prompt line consultants to add their own in-
sights, and to edit and prune a project’s discussion and
document databases. In some cases, they were charged
to develop topical “Power Packs” in Notes—a structured
and filtered set of online materials including sales presen-
tations and proposal templates. Davenport observed that
these “knowledge networkers” understood their network’s
domains and that these were short-term assignments for
line consultants.
In this case, E&Y designed a human organizational “in-
telligence system” for sharing insights, ideas, and mate-
rials in specific topical areas. Lotus Notes served as an
information support system—a medium for storing, orga-
nizing, and communicating these materials.
Taken together, these cases illustrate varied conse-
quences of Notes’ use in large consulting firms, not one
fixed effect. Varied, conflicting consequences in differ-
ent settings are common in this body of research. Our
job as researchers is not simply to document the various
210 R. KLING
consequences of computerization, but also to theorize
them (see Lamb, 1996; Robey, 1997). Different organi-
zational incentive systems for different professionals is
one way to conceptualize a key concept that helps to inte-
grate some of these seemingly disparate cases. (Also see
Markus and Keil, 1994, for a case study of a little-used
large-scale expert system whose use was not supported
by organizational incentive systems.) It is possible that
the way that Notes is used at both PriceWaterhouse (now
merged with Coopers-Lybrand) and E&Y have changed
since the studies that inform this article were written. Our
point here is not to praise E&Y and to criticize PriceWa-
terhouse. Rather, it is to understand how their behavior can
help us develop empirically grounded concepts that help
us to predict (or at least understand) variations in the ways
that people and groups use information technologies.
One key idea of social informatics research is that the
“social context” of information technology development
and use plays a significant role in influencing the ways
that people use information and technologies, and thus
influences their consequences for work, organizations, and
other social relationships. Social context does not refer
to some abstracted “cloud” that hovers above people and
information technology; it refers to a specific matrix of
social relationships. Here, social context is characterized
by particular incentive systems for using, organizing, and
sharing information at work. In the cases just described,
different groups within PriceWaterhouse and E&Y have
different incentives to share information about the project
know-how, and, thus, how they use or avoid Lotus Notes.
The case of E&Y also illustrates an important idea—
that of conceptualizing the design of computer and net-
worked systems as a set of interrelated decisions about
technology and the organization of work. Unfortunately,
thinking and talking about computerization as the devel-
opment of socio-technical configurations, rather than as
simply installing and using a new technology, is not com-
monplace. It is common for managers and technologists
to discuss some social repercussions of new technologies,
such as the sponsorship of projects, training people to
use new systems, and controls over access to information.
However, these discussions usually treat all or most social
behavior as separable from the technologies, whereas the
E&Y case suggests how a more integrated socio-technical
view is critical. We will amplify this key idea with addi-
tional examples.
5.2 Work Processes Matters With Documentary
Systems
The social informatics approaches have been applied to
some issues that are of particular concern to designers
of digital libraries—working with documentary systems.
How do people work with documentary systems in prac-
tice? We know that certain visions did not come about,
such as the early 1980s vision of the paperless office. It is
intriguing to speculate why one of the hot items in a “paper-
less office” is a laser printer. Why are laser printer sales
rising steadily—and faster ones, more colorful ones—if
the direction of development is to abandon paper? There
is a conceptual disconnect here. It is not because people
like paper in the same way that people have an affection
for dogs or cats. It is not a sentimental attachment. Laser
printers are not popular because people enjoy the look and
feel of typical 8-1/2′′ × 11′′, 20-pound bond.
Some people do like the hand-feel of richly textured
paper. Wired Magazine, at least, is printed in vivid colors.
It is visually engaging, although some people are put off
by its intensely colored pages. People at times like books
and other documents which are printed on nicely textured
paper. We should not ignore the sensual qualities of some
high-quality papers. But standard 20-pound printer and
copier papers are not designed for sensuality.
Careful studies of professional and clerical docu-
mentary work find that many people engage in com-
plex activities—such as annotating documents; comparing
them, for instance, as an editor compares two versions of
a paper or a book chapter to see what the changes were; or
integrating them, for instance, in assembling a long report
(see Suchman, 1996). The screen spaces of the more com-
mon 14-, 15-, or even 17-inch displays are too limited. To
compare two full-page manuscripts, it helps to put them
side by side. That would require about 24 inches of display.
Today, 24-inch displays, priced at about $1500, are too
costly for most offices. While the costs and overall mass
of large-screen monitors will decline in the next decade,
paper has other virtues. Many people who work with mul-
tiple documents mark them up with quick annotations and
diagrams that are more clumsy with word processors and
take them to different places; paper is simple and versatile.
For certain transaction systems, such as airline reserva-
tion systems, the move to paperless transactions has been
workable—because it reduces operational costs in reissu-
ing new tickets and people make few additional notations
on their tickets. In contrast, people who are doing ana-
lytical work with manuscripts have found paper to be an
extremely durable and useful medium, for a variety of rea-
sons. Some of the value of paper is based on the work of
comparing and working with documents side by side. It is
partly a real estate issue, and partly a portability issue—
documents can be moved around an office or taken off-site
quickly and easily without having to have a running device.
Paper plays important roles in some places where we
don’t think it is in use. An interesting example is in civilian
air traffic control systems. The movie version of air traffic
controllers shows them staring at bright green displays.
In real life they do depend upon computer displays. But
they also keep track of the planes that they are monitoring
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 211
on little pieces of paper a little bigger than that of fortune
cookies, which record flights, flight vectors, and speed,
among other things. Because they divide their work by air
space, when the plane moves from one scope to the next,
they pass the paper over. Gary Stix (1994) examines (a) the
nature of the work and communication via paper strips, and
(b) IBM’s efforts in 1993 to automate it. Stix reports that
IBM had a database with 65 fields—a little complicated for
real-time control! That project has since been abandoned
by the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) in the United States
at a cost of several hundreds of millions dollars. But the
FAA will continue to develop upgrades, because the com-
puters on which the air traffic control system runs are ag-
ing, and it is hard to get spare parts, technicians, and so on.
This “work-oriented view” of how people work and
use computer systems in practice is not always inspiring.
Many people work hard, and they do many interesting
things, but their work with information technologies is not
streamlined. Professionals, for example, often work across
media, across technologies, and across social boundaries
in ways that new, computer-based systems don’t readily
integrate. Their workspaces can appear messy and their
workflow cumbersome, even when they have good com-
puter systems to help with part of their work. Social infor-
matics is one sustained way of understanding these issues
in ways that do help improve the workability and design
of systems and information services for various workers
and the public.
5.3 Socio-Technical Systems and Electronic Journals
The use of the Internet to support scientific communica-
tion is one of the major shifts in the practice of science
in this era, and it has generated numerous experiments
and significant discussion. In the scientific communities,
these communications include informal e-mail, the com-
munication of conference programs as they gel, the shar-
ing of preprints, access to electronic versions of journal
articles, and the development of shared disciplinary cor-
puses. These communicative practices are becoming more
important in many fields, although they are rarely the cen-
tral communications media. However, only a few analyses
take sufficient account of the ways in which the social di-
mensions of publications, such as the design of electronic
journals, influence their use (see, for example, Kling &
Covi, 1995).
One common approach to conceptualizing new forms
such as electronic journals, online newspapers, electronic
forums, Web sites, and digital libraries emphasizes their
technologically based information-processing features,
such as enabling authors and readers to communicate more
directly without the mediation of libraries or expensive
publishers. The socio-technical approach, explained next,
views these new forms as mixing together both technolog-
ical elements and social relationships into an effectively
inseparable ensemble.
From a technological information-processing perspec-
tive, new media—such as electronic journals,3 databases,
preprint servers—are said to reduce the costs of commu-
nication, expand the range of people and locations from
which materials are accessible, and generally speed com-
munications. According to this view, as scholars in all
scientific fields work with data, and communicate both
formally and informally with other scholars, all of these
electronic media forums should be adopted and used fairly
uniformly. Differences in value would rest upon the dif-
ferences in technical architectures. For example, readers
would be more likely to read electronic journal A rather
than journal B if journal A added more informational
value, such as having an elaborate set of crosslinks be-
tween articles, or including more extensive sets of data
and graphics.
Even the strongest proponents of electronic journals
agree that technological design alone is not sufficient to
insure a good quality journal. There is a strong consensus
that the quality of a journal’s scholarly content is impor-
tant in making it viable, but there is substantial disagree-
ment about the means of attracting high-quality materials.
All the proposals and counterproposals for attracting high-
quality authors rest on social analyses of a journal, rather
than purely technological analyses. For example, one as-
pect of electronic journals that is commonly discussed is
the role of peer review.4 There are many ways of organiz-
ing peer reviews, but each strategy for selecting reviewers
and translating their assessments into feedback for authors
and publication criteria for the journal is a social process.
These social processes are supported by communication
media, and electronic media may facilitate or inhibit spe-
cific ways of organizing reviewers, reviewing, and editing.
The value of a socio-technical analysis can be illustrated
by contrasting the design and functioning of two different
electronic journals: Electronic Transactions of Artificial
Intelligence and The Electronic Journal of Cognitive and
Brain Sciences. Superficially, these scientific electronic
journals have much in common: Each is hosted on a Web
site, relies upon peer review to select high-quality articles,
and posts articles for public prereview before they are ac-
cepted or rejected for formal publication. Both journals
were established in 1997 and have had about 18 months of
activity to establish a publishing pattern. These two jour-
nals are especially interesting in the ways that their de-
signers envision attracting authors to submit high-quality
articles, and to insure that only high-quality articles are
actually published.
However, one of these journals seems to be viable
and one seems moribund. The technological publica-
tion system for each journal functions effectively, and I
will indicate how the differences rest on their design as
212 R. KLING
socio-technical systems. Rather than analyze the journals
as I describe them, I believe that it would be useful for read-
ers to note the contrasts in the two journals’ designs, and to
try to evaluate which journal is the more viable and why.
Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
(ETAI). The ECCAI (European Coordinating Committee
for Artificial Intelligence) announced the ETAI as a journal
in May 1997, with Professor Erik Sandewall, a pioneer of
artificial intelligence research in Scandinavia, as its editor-
in-chief. The journal’s editors and organizers sought to
make the review process of articles more open for authors
and readers, by making some aspects of an article’s review
very public. ETAI’s editors claim:
“The ETAI represents a novel approach to electronic
publishing. We do not simply inherit the patterns from
the older technology, but instead we have rethought the
structure of scientific communication in order to make the
best possible use of international computer networks as
well as electronic document and database technologies.”
They describe their editorial process as follows: “Arti-
cles submitted to the ETAI are reviewed in a 2-phase pro-
cess. After submission, an article is open to public online
discussion in the area’s News Journal [part of the journal’s
Web site]. After the discussion period of three months,
and after the authors have had a chance to revise it, the
article is reviewed for acceptance by the ETAI, using con-
fidential peer review and journal level quality criteria. This
second phase is expected to be rather short because of the
preceding discussion and possible revision. During the en-
tire reviewing process, the article is already published in a
“First Publication Archive”, which compares to publica-
tion as a departmental tech report.” (From ETAI, 1997; see
Sandewall, 1998 for a more elaborate description of their
editorial process.)
The ETAI is divided into several topical sections, each
section with its own section editor. The ETAI Web site
has a public discussion section linked to each submitted
article. An annual paper edition of the articles, without the
discussion, is published by the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences (KVA).
The Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sci-
ences (EJCBS). The EJCBS was devised by Dr. Zoltan
Nadasdy of Rutgers University as an e-journal “that works
without editors” and that offers the following features
(Nadasdy, 1998a)5 :
“Instead of a hidebound peer-review system, we use
an interactive “vote,” in which those with comments and
suggestions post them along with the article.”
“Instead of a lengthy discussion carried out over a pe-
riod of months and years as letters are submitted to journals
and await publication, we allow anyone to post letters, and
allow authors to answer them immediately.”
“Instead of layout designers, we make use of
. . . automated-formatting software that converts simple
ASCII documents into HTML. The system supports graph-
ical illustrations and automatically inserts them into the
text. Hypertext is also inserted into the articles.”
Nadasdy sought to devise “an autonomous system” that
could run on its own after it was programmed. It would
rely upon readers to be referees, and not rely upon an
editorial board. He designed it with the aim “that [it] would
be able to control itself based on reasonable rules.” He
developed software to automatically create a Web page
with graphics for each submitted article, so that no human
editorial activity would be required to post articles.
“EJCBS uses a two-tier acceptance procedure that
makes reviewing automatic and allows readers to control
final acceptance: review status and archive status. Papers
in review status are evaluated by the readers . . . a weight
system controls the score given by different reader cate-
gories. The scores are transferred to a database that will
be averaged at the end of a month, and the final status
of the paper will be decided accordingly. Articles that re-
ceive a certain average score, or higher, are transferred to
an archive of accepted papers. Those papers that do not
receive the minimal average scores are rejected.”
Nadasdy designed EJCBS to improve the speed of publi-
cation, be low cost, enhance interactivity, and enable broad
distribution. He claims that “those features are all inte-
grated into the system I call “interactive publishing.” The
impact of interactive publishing could be enormous. It re-
defines concepts of traditional publishing, such as editing,
acceptance, reviews and comments, and archives.”
The reviewing practices of EJCBS and ETAI differ con-
siderably. EJCBS relies on anonymous reviewing by (self-
selected) readers. They visit its Web site and rate an article
on several 7-point scales to indicate their views of its qual-
ity and importance. Nadasdy hoped that EJCBS could “run
itself” and has tried to automate key editorial processes. It
is an extreme example of removing editorial attention and
guidance from the publishing process and relying upon a
readers’ plebiscite.
In contrast, an article that is submitted to ETAI is a topic
for public discussion by participants in the research com-
munity. During the 3-month open review period, questions
and comments are signed. In an informal reading of the
discussion about several articles, I found that only a few
questions were typically posted. However, they reflected
a deep understanding of the topics, and some were elab-
orate counterexamples or reformulations of the authors’
positions. Authors’ replies were also public, and seemed
to engage the technical issues raised in the queries.
Both ETAI and EJCBS were initiated in 1997. ETAI
accepted five articles for publication in 1997, while EJCBS
posted two short articles in September 1997 but has not
accepted any. ETAI continues to receive a steady stream
of submissions (eight articles in 1998) while EJCBS does
not.6 The contrast between the ETAI and the EJCBS offers
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 213
an interesting illustration of a (simplified) socio-technical
systems analysis.
5.3.1 Socio-Technical Systems. Social informatics
research has produced some useful ideas and findings that
are applicable to many kinds of information technologies
and shed interesting light on these dilemmas of Internet
use. The concept of “computerized information systems
as social technical systems” is one such idea that helps
us understand the character of e-journals, as well as other
e-media.
Information and communication technologies are of-
ten discussed as tools or simple appliances, even when
they refer to complex arrangements of varied equipment,
rules/roles/resources, and actual organizational practices,
as with WWW sites or airline reservation systems. It is
more interesting to view specific information technolo-
gies as “socio-technical systems”7 —a complex, interde-
pendent system comprised of:
� People in various roles and relationships with each
other and with other system elements;
� Hardware (computer mainframes, workstations,
peripherals, telecommunications equipment);
� Software (operating systems, utilities and appli-
cation programs);
� Techniques (management science models, voting
schemes);
� Support resources (training/support/help); and
� Information structures (content and content
providers, rules/norms/regulations, such as those
that authorize people to use systems and informa-
tion in specific ways, access controls).
These elements are not simply a static list, but are
interrelated within a matrix of social and technical
dependencies.8
A systems designer with a socio-technical orientation
does not simply consider these elements while work-
ing in a “design studio” far away from the people who
will use a specific system. Effectively designing socio-
technical systems also requires upon a set of “discovery
processes” to help the designers understand which fea-
tures and trade-offs will most appeal to the people who
are most likely to use the system.9 There are a number of
discovery processes for learning about the preferences of
the men and women who are likely to use these systems.
These discovery processes include workplace ethnogra-
phy (Simonsen & Kensing, 1997), focus groups, user par-
ticipation in design teams (Bolstrom & Heinen, 1977b;
Carmel, Whittaker, & George, 1993), and participatory
design strategies (Schuler & Namioka, 1993; Eckehard
et al., 1997). These approaches differ in many significant
ways, such as the contextual richness of the understand-
ings that they reveal and the extent to which they give the
people who will use systems influence and power in their
design. These issues are the subject of a lively body of
research that overlaps social informatics. However, to dis-
cuss it in detail here would lead us away from our focus
on the structural elements of a socio-technical analysis.
For our post hoc analytical purposes, we can focus on
the structural features of the socio-technical system that we
have just listed. We view the design of ETAI and EJCBS
not simply as one of artifacts, such as the compilers that
Nadasdy developed to automatically translate submitted
article files into postable WWW pages for EJCBS. Rather,
the interplay of social assumptions and practices that are
reflected in technological design features helps us to un-
derstand the relative success of these two e-journals.
In the case of ETAI, authors link up with potential read-
ers through the journal’s published articles. However, in
order to have an article published, an author must be will-
ing to discuss it in a public forum with other self-identified
artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. This arrangement
adds an important social and discursive element to publish-
ing in the journal: Authors must be willing to participate
in this part of the AI community by discussing their re-
search. Publication in ETAI entails a set of relatively pub-
lic social actions. Further, the editorial board of the ETAI
was developed to include senior members European Co-
ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence and paper
publication through the Royal Swedish Academy of Sci-
ences. Potential authors have good reason to believe that
their articles will be known to participants in the European
AI research community. According to Erik Sandewall, this
visibility is a mixed blessing: It can enhance one’s status
for work that is well received, but also can be embarrass-
ing for authors whose work is ill-conceived, is not well
developed, or is not well received.
The EJCBS looks more problematic as a socio-technical
system. An author who submits an article will receive
votes and possible comments from anonymous readers,
but does not have a forum in which to respond or to de-
velop a discussion with the readers. While the ETAI has an
editorial board whose members participate in a variety of
high status scientific social networks and promote the jour-
nal, the EJCBS was designed by one relatively low-status
and not well connected bio-scientist who would like to
have it work without promotional or editorial attention—
autonomously. Authors who publish in EJCBS are not
guaranteed any attention among highly active scientists
in their field.
Nadasdy (1998b) believes that he has “shown that the
(journal) concept works, and that people just have to come
around to use it.” His comment reflects a technologically
focused view of e-publishing, one that pays much more
attention to automating scripts and voting procedures than
to seeking ways to effectively mobilize a lively group of
authors and readers around the journal.
214 R. KLING
I have developed these two examples at some length
because they help us to see how a socio-technical per-
spective on e-journals helps us to better understand how
they may or may not serve as vibrant media for com-
munity communication. Nadasdy did “market the jour-
nal” by encouraging about 100 senior scientists to publish
their articles in it. A few of them sent encouraging com-
ments, but none submitted their research articles for review
and possible publication. Nadasdy’s software works; if an
e-journal is only a technological artifact, he “has a work-
ing journal.” However, a genuine “working journal” re-
quires a continuing stream of authors and readers, then
the design requires a more sophisticated social-technical
approach than Nadasdy has taken on. These ideas extend
beyond e-journals, to digital libraries, electronic forums,
and so on.
It is also possible to revisit the cases of Lotus Notes
use in consulting firms to examine their design as socio-
technical communication systems within the social net-
works of the firms. One major difference between Price-
Waterhouse and E&Y lies in E&Y’s creating new social
groups with a responsibility for collecting, organizing, and
disseminating information for which Lotus Notes could be
a helpful medium.
Further, the concept of socio-technical systems can help
us understand some of the differences between WWW
sites and digital libraries that are highly used or little used.
As technological systems, they are collections of software,
data (text, picture files, etc.), links, and metadata (indices,
etc.) that run on networked computers. For socio-technical
systems, we can pay special attention to:
� People in various roles and relationships with each
other and with other system elements;
� Support resources (training/support/help); and
� Information structures (content and content
providers, rules/norms/regulations, such as those
that authorize people to use systems and informa-
tion in specific ways, access controls).
We ask about the importance of their content for various
constituencies, who is authorized to change content and
how that matters, etc.
There are many such questions that help us connect
technological artifacts in a lively way to a social world.
As a design practice, a “socio-technical approach” also
requires a discovery process that helps designers to effec-
tively understand the relevant life worlds and work worlds
of the people who will use their systems.
5.4 Computing Infrastructure and Public Access
to Information Via the Internet
There are innumerable examples of the use and value of
the Internet in providing new kinds of communications to
support a cornucopia of human activities in virtually every
profession and kind of institution. In the United States, the
professional and middle classes have found the Internet to
be useful for communication with some government agen-
cies, for some forms of shopping, for tackling investments,
for maintaining ties with friends and family via email, and
as a source of entertainment.
There are also many examples where the Internet en-
ables the middle-class public to have better access to im-
portant information (see Kahin and Keller, 1995). In the
United States, the public is beginning to turn to medi-
cal sources on the Web, to get alternative answers on the
Internet, in discussion groups and so on, and sometimes
bypassing the medical establishment.
Some people seek either alternative medical advice or
information about issues that their doctors don’t deal with
very well. Surgeons, for example, may be good at doing
very skilled surgery, but they may not be very good for giv-
ing people an understanding of what it takes to go through
the recovery process. People sometimes find that certain
Internet sources can be extremely helpful as either alter-
natives or supplements. This is simply a hypothesis, but
there is anecdotal evidence that the Internet provides an
alternative communication means for many middle-class
people to bypass the medical establishment. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that doctors vary in their responses to
their patients feeling better informed, and sometimes chal-
lenging their advice—from encouragement to annoyance.
What kinds of changes in systematic patient–doctor rela-
tionships may result is as yet unclear.
In the United States, Vice-President Al Gore promotes
networking for libraries, clinics, and schools, by arguing
that if they are wired together, their use will improve pub-
lic education and enable substantially improved public
services. How to actually transform such networks into
meaningful social support systems is a question that re-
mains unanswered.
While many people install additional phone lines for
online computer use, affordable telephone service and In-
ternet service providers (ISPs) are available in urban areas
(Kahin & Keller, 1995). Access to ISPs, and even basic
telephone service, is more problematic in many rural ar-
eas. In 1995, about 28.8 million people in the United States
16 years and over had access to the Internet at work, school
or home; 16.4 million people used the Internet and 11.5
million people of these people used the Web. About 80%
of these people used the Internet at least once a week.
However, about 182 million people 16 years and over did
not have access to the Internet (Hoffman, Kalsbeek, &
Novak, 1996). A 1997 nation-wide household study found
that computer ownership and e-mail access were rising
rapidly—about 94% of households have telephones, 37%
have personal computers, 26% have modems, and 19%
have online access (McConnaughey & Lader. 1998). The
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 215
numbers of people with Internet access continues to rise
rapidly.
It might appear that technological access is the pri-
mary roadblock to expanded Internet use. “Technolog-
ical access” refers to the physical availability of suit-
able equipment, including computers of adequate speed
and equipped with appropriate software for a given ac-
tivity. Scenarios of “ordinary people” using the Inter-
net often assume that computer support is easy to orga-
nize, and that access to information and services is not
problematic.
In contrast, “social access” refers to know-how, a mix of
professional knowledge economic resources, and techni-
cal skills, to use technologies in ways that enhance profes-
sional practices and social life. In practice, social access—
the abilities of diverse organizations and people from many
walks of life to actually use these services—will be critical
if they are to move from the laboratories and pilot projects
into widespread use where they can vitalize the nation and
the economy. Social access should not be viewed as an
“add on” to a technological structure. Many systems de-
signers have learned, for example, that a well-designed
system does not simply tack on a “computer interface”
after its internal structure has been set in place. The de-
sign of human interfaces and internal structures is highly
coupled for systems that effectively support people’s work
and communication (see National Research Council, 1997,
for an integrated review). In a similar way, social access
is integral to the design and development of systems and
services that are to be widely used.
Some analysts do not view social access to the Internet
for “ordinary people” as problematic, since they believe
that access costs will rapidly decline and the public’s com-
puting skills will continue to rise. In this view, time and
markets will resolve most access issues. In contrast, we
believe that social access to the Internet is likely to prove
vexing for many people, based on what careful studies of
computer use and Internet use have shown us.
Although 50% of U.S. households may have computers
by the year 2000, organizations have been the major sites
for adopting networked information systems, especially
as implementers of advanced technologies. There are few
studies of computer use in households. In one careful study
of “ordinary households” (HomeNet), researchers found
that using the Internet is too hard for many “ordinary peo-
ple” (Kiesler, Kraut, Mukhopadhyay, & Scherlis. 1997):
“Over 70% of the households called the help desk. Calls
to the help desk represented the behavior of some of the
more sophisticated users. Less sophisticated users dropped
out once they hit usability barriers. The kinds of prob-
lems logged by help desk staff included problems in in-
stalling phone service, configuring the telecommunication
software, busy signals (users often blamed themselves!),
buggy software, inexperience with mice, keyboards, scroll
bars, terminology, radio buttons, and menus. Yet, in our
home interviews, we noted there were many more prob-
lems participants had not called about.”
“. . . We thought that as everyone learned how to use
the computer and what the Internet could do for them,
the influence of their initial computer skill would decline
with time. We were wrong. Even after a year of experience
with the Internet, participants’ initial computer skill still
constrained their Internet usage. This result held across
different gender and age groups.”
These findings serve as a cautionary note about our
expecting the North American public to rapidly form a
“network nation.” One intriguing finding of the HomeNet
project is that families with adolescents made much more
use of the Internet than those without. We suspect that
many of these teenagers became critical “on-site” technical
consultants for their parents.
5.4.1 Infrastructure for Computing Support Is Social
as Well as Technological. Personal computers (PCs) are
much more complicated to install and use for a diverse
array of tasks than are “turnkey appliances” such as tele-
visions and VCRs. While it is a standing joke that most
people don’t know how to program their VCRs (and thus
watch an LCD blinking 00:00), most people can reliably
play a videotape and enjoy the resulting entertainment. In
contrast, PCs that use networked services require much
more complex configurations (including data rates and IP
numbers) that can change with changes in network con-
figurations and service providers.
Effective computer systems that use Internet ser-
vices will require reliable complementary technological
resources—such as printers and electricity (reliable in ur-
ban settings, sometimes problematic after disasters and in
remote regions). What is less well appreciated is how the
infrastructure for making computer systems workable also
includes a variety of resources that are social in charac-
ter. Skilled technical installers, trainers, and consultants
are the most obvious social resources. In addition, people
who use advanced networking applications need know-
how—to be able to learn to effectively integrate them into
their working practices—based on learning from others.
There is some debate about how much computer use has
simplified in the last decade. It is probably easier to use a
stand-alone PC “out of the box.” However, the dominant
operating systems, such as Windows 95/98/NT, and Unix
(and Linux), can still stump experts when applications or
components interact badly.
System infrastructure is a socio-technical system since
technical capabilities depend upon skilled people, ad-
ministrative procedures, etc.; and social capabilities are
enabled by simpler supporting technologies (e.g., word
processors for creating technical documents, cellular
telephones and pagers for contacting rapid-response
216 R. KLING
consultants) (Kling, 1992). Malfunctioning computer sys-
tems are not simply an opportunity loss, such as a book that
is bought but not read. When people organize their days
about the expectations that key technologies will work
well—and they don’t—they often spend considerable time
tinkering to get systems to work, waiting for help to come,
and so on.
Workable computer applications are usually supported
by a strong socio-technical infrastructure. The “surface
features” of computer systems are the most visible and the
primary subject of debates and systems analysis. But they
are only one part of computerization projects. Many key
parts of information systems are neither immediately visi-
ble nor interesting in their novelty. They include technical
infrastructure, such as reliable electricity (which may be
a given in urban America, but problematic in wilderness
areas, or in urban areas after a major devastation.) They
also involve a range of skilled support—from people to
document systems features and train people to use them,
to rapid-response consultants who can diagnose and repair
system failures.
Much of the research about appropriate infrastructure
comes from studies of systems that underperformed or
failed (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Kling & Scacchi, 1982).
The social infrastructure for a given computer system is
not homogeneous across social sites. For example, the
Worm Community System was a collaboratory for molec-
ular biologists who worked in hundreds of university lab-
oratories; key social infrastructure for network connec-
tivity and (UNIX) skills depended upon the laboratory’s
work organization (and local university resources) (see
Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Researchers found that the Worm
Community System was technically well designed, but
it was rather weak as an effective collaboratory because
of the uneven and often limited support for its technical
requirements in various university labs. In short, a weak
local socio-technical infrastructure can undermine the ef-
fective workability of computer systems, including those
in people’s homes, as we have already discussed (also see
Haddon & Silverstone, 1995).
6. WHY SOCIAL INFORMATICS MATTERS
Social informatics research pertains to information tech-
nology use and social change in any sort of social set-
ting, not just organizations. Social informatics researchers
are specially interested in developing reliable knowledge
about information technology and social change, based on
systematic empirical research, to inform both public policy
debates and professional practice. Many of us have devel-
oped concepts to help understand the design, use, config-
uration, and/or consequences of information and commu-
nication technologies so that they are actually workable
for people. This contrasts with high-spirited but largely a
priori promotions of technologies that occasionally work
well for people, occasionally are valuable, are sometimes
abandoned, are sometimes unusable, and thus incur pre-
dictable waste and inspire misplaced hopes. That is one
important way that “social informatics matters” and one
that I have emphasized in this article. This view of social
informatics has important repercussions for public policy,
professional practice, and the education of information
technology professionals (see Kling, 1993; Kling & Allen,
1996; Kling, Crawford, Rosenbaum, Sawyer, & Weisband,
1999).
Social informatics research also investigates intriguing
new social phenomena that emerge when people use in-
formation technology, such as the ways that people de-
velop trust in virtual teams (Iacono & Weisband, 1997)
or the ways that disciplinary norms influence scholars use
of electronic communication media (Kling & McKim, in
press). But these phenomena would be the focus of another
article.
In this article I have identified a few key ideas that come
from 25 years of systematic analytical and critical research
about information technology and social life. There are
other sources for a more expanded treatment (see, for ex-
ample Kling, 1993; Kling & Allen, 1996; Bishop & Star,
1996; Kling & Star, 1998; Kling, Crawford, Rosenbaum,
Sawyer, & Weisband, 1999).
Other social informatics researchers might empha-
size other ideas. I have emphasized organizational exam-
ples because information technology and organizational
change (organizational informatics) have been more care-
fully researched and theorized in complex organizations
than computer use in settings such as households.
7. SOCIAL INFORMATICS AS A FIELD NAME
Social informatics is a neologism. I have written enthusi-
astically about social informatics, but many people are
appropriately cautious about catchy new terms whose
connotations can mislead. The label “social informatics”
emerged from discussions in 1996 within the community
of researchers who conduct the kind of research discussed
in this article. Several social informatics researchers par-
ticipated in a workshop at UCLA on social aspects of dig-
ital libraries in 1996 (see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/DL/).
In the course of discussing research about digital libraries
and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), we
realized that we did not have a good label for the body
of research that we now call social informatics. We used
various labels, including “social analysis of computing,”
“social impacts of computing,” “information systems re-
search,” and “behavioral information systems research.”
Several of us felt that it was time to help make this
body of ongoing research much more accessible by find-
ing one name that could serve as an efficient pointer, and
WHAT IS SOCIAL INFORMATICS AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 217
a banner. Instead of being skeptical of new nomencla-
ture, we should be willing to find a field name that we
could use. A number of us discussed alternatives such as
“social analysis of computing,” “interpretive informatics,”
“socio-technical systems”—and the term “social informat-
ics” came up as the least offensive alternative of the group.
For some people it inspired curiosity; for others, it simply
was not a turn-off, whereas for some, “interpretive infor-
matics” tended not to cross cultural lines.
The social informatics label energizes some faculty.
One colleague at another university told me that he didn’t
know how to succinctly characterize his interests when
he was searching for a professorship. When he learned
about social informatics, he felt that it was a terrific label
for his interests. But I also know some faculty, especially
those who are in single-discipline academic units, whose
research comfortably fits within social informatics who
will resist the term because adopting it doesn’t help them
in their struggles for research resources, good students, and
impact for their research within their traditionally defined
disciplines.
There are a number of journals that publish social infor-
matics research. A comprehensive list would be lengthy;
but most of the journals listed would be ones that have
published only a few social informatics articles. There
are a few journals that are good sources of social infor-
matics research, including The Information Society and
some journals in the information systems field, such as
Information Systems Research. Social informatics stud-
ies appear in communication journals such as the Journal
of Communication as well as in the electronic Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication. The Journal of the
American Society of Information Science published a spe-
cial issue in October 1998 devoted to social informatics
(Kling, Rosenbaum, & Hert, 1998). The Communications
of the ACM, a magazine, also publishes articles that are
based on social informatics research. There are numerous
books (see Dutton, 1997; Huff & Finholt, 1994; Kling,
1996; Kiesler, 1997; Smith & Kollock, 1998; and De-
Sanctis & Fulk, in press, as entry points). The research
is conducted in several different disciplines, especially in
some social sciences, information science, computer sci-
ence, and information systems.
The National Science Foundation sponsored a work-
shop on Advances in Organizational and Social Infor-
matics in the Fall of 1997 to help to further develop
the field (see http://memex.lib.indiana.edu/siwkshop/
SocInfo1.html). The workshop’s participants character-
ized social informatics as “the interdisciplinary study of
the design, uses and consequences of information and
communication technologies that takes into account their
interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.”
This characterization sets some boundaries, as well as
articulating a focus for social informatics. For example,
simple surveys of the number of people who use the Inter-
net for specific purposes that did not examine these uses
in institutional and cultural contexts would not be a so-
cial informatics study. However, such survey data could
be useful as part of a social informatics analysis.
In addition, the workshop participants characterized
social informatics research as analytical, critical, or nor-
mative. The analytical orientation refers to studies that
develop theories about information technologies in insti-
tutional and cultural contexts or to empirical studies that
are organized to contribute to such theorizing. I have em-
phasized analytical research in this short article. The criti-
cal orientation refers to examining information technolo-
gies from perspectives that do not automatically and “un-
critically” adopt the goals and beliefs of the groups that
commission, design, or implement specific information
technologies.
Our discussion of the use of Lotus Notes in light of or-
ganizational incentive structures illustrates the analytical
orientation in social informatics. The critical orientation is
possibly the most novel (Agre & Schuler, 1997). It encour-
ages professionals and researchers to examine information
technologies from multiple perspectives (such as the var-
ious people who use them in different contexts, as well
as people who design, implement, or maintain them), and
to examine possible “failure modes” and service losses,
as well as ideal or routine ICT operations. This article il-
lustrates a critical perspective in the examination of Lotus
Notes’ use, the design of electronic journals, and public
access to the Internet.
A book based on this workshop examines the char-
acter of the field, some of the key ideas, and teach-
ing issues (Kling, Crawford, Rosenbaum, Sawyer, &
Weisband, 1999). It also includes discussions of ways
to develop the field, to communicate key ideas of so-
cial informatics to relevant scholarly and professional
communities, and to enrich the curricula for computing-
oriented students. Social informatics has a Web page at
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI and a small collection of
online discussion forums. The WWW page includes sec-
tions that list and link courses, research conferences, de-
gree programs, and so on. There are many opportunities
to conduct research in social informatics, to translate re-
search ideas into professional practice or to teach. I invite
you to join us in a lively adventure.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has benefited from continuing conversations
about social informatics with many colleagues and stu-
dents. Phil Agre, Bill Arms, Holly Crawford, Blaise
Cronin, Elisabeth Davenport, Joanna Fortuna, Amy Fried-
lander, Roberta Lamb, Suzanne Iacono, Geoff McKim,
Javed Mostafa, Howard Rosenbaum, Steve Sawyer,
218 R. KLING
Deborah Shaw, Bob Travica, and Suzanne Weisband com-
mented on interim drafts of this article. The discussion of
scholarly communication on the Internet is based upon
joint research with Geoff McKim. This work was sup-
ported, in part, by NSF grants IRI-9714211 and SBR-
9872961.
NOTES
1. This account of Lotus Notes’ use is based on my integration of
data reported in Mehler (1992) and Orlikowski (1993). Mehler is a jour-
nalist who explicitly identifies PriceWaterhouse. Wanda Orlikowski, an
MIT professor who has made important contributions to organizational
informatics, protects the identity of this organization with a pseudonym.
This protection is often important for researchers to be able to publish
their studies, and normally is effective in masking an organization’s
identity. However, PriceWaterhouse’s unusual mass purchase of Notes
for all of its consulting staff was the subject of several reverential stories
in the technical and business press (see, for example, Dyson, 1990a,
1990b). PriceWaterhouse was widely known to be the first major con-
sulting firm to make a major commitment to Notes in the 1989–1991
period.
2. See previous note about Orliklowski’s study.
3. We will focus on those electronic journals whose primary distri-
bution medium is electronic, unless we note otherwise.
4. There are substantial criticisms of peer reviewing as well as de-
fenses (see, for example, Hibbitts 1996, 1997; Zariski, 1997a, 1997b).
5. I have restructured Nadasdy’s list to better fit this analysis.
6. It is worth noting that other refereed e-journals also publish only
a few articles per year. While these rates are a small fraction of the
number of articles published annually by quarterly paper journals, they
seem to be typical of refereed e-journals in the mid-1990s. For exam-
ple, the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (CJTCS)
published the following number of articles: 1995 (4 articles), 1996 (6
articles), 1997 (5 articles). (See http://www.cs.uchicago.edu /publica-
tions/cjtcs/articles/contents.html.) This journal has an editorial board
of 41 members, but few of them publish in the journal. Even so, the
MIT Press assumed publishing responsibility for the CJCTS in 1998.
The MIT Press has also changed the circulation policy from one that
is “free” and publicly accessible to one that is restricted to subscribers.
It lists over 60 institutional subscribers whose subscription price is
$125/year.
7. The term “socio-technical systems” was most strongly advocated
in the 1950’s–1970s by a group of psychologists who were originally
associated with the Tavistock Institute in London, England. They were
particularly concerned with improving the effectiveness and psycholog-
ical well-being of production workers. They advocated ways to “jointly
optimize” the technological and social systems of workplaces, and ad-
vocated such practices as autonomous work teams, rotating jobs, and
pay for learning new skills. This usage has also influenced some think-
ing about information systems design, and is reflected in two classic
papers by Bostrom and Heinnen (1977a, 1997b). In this view, a tech-
nology is an artifact whose typical use has consequences for the social
interactions and social relationships of the people who use it. The socio-
technical analyst considers these social effects when designing a new
artifact (including information systems).
Our use of the concept of “socio-technical systems” goes beyond
this view. It differs in the typical social settings to which it is applied,
since we do not emphasize production workers or solutions such as
autonomous work teams or “joint optimization.” However, more fun-
damentally the systems that we characterize as socio-technical so inter-
twine social and technological elements that they are a complex admix-
ture (see Bowker, Star, Gasser, & Turner, 1997; Mansell & Silverstone,
1995; Wellman, et al., 1996).
8. We have referred to these relationships and dependencies as a
“web of computing” (Kling & Scacchi, 1982; Kling, 1992).
9. The term “user” is a bland descriptor of varied social roles that
people play in new media such as digital libraries and electronic jour-
nals. For example, the people who are likely to use digital libraries are
likely to include readers, as well as a variety of digital librarians to
support the documentary collection as a viable service. In the case of
electronic journals, “the users” refer to a variety of participants includ-
ing authors, readers, editors, and journal production staff.
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Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 1
WHY DESIGN EDUCATION MUST CHANGE
DONALD A. NORMAN1
Traditionally what designers lack in knowledge, they make up
for in craft skills. Whether it be sketching, modeling, detailing
or rendering, designers take an inordinate amount of pride in
honing key techniques over many years. Unfortunately many of
these very skills have limited use in the new design domains.
(Core 77 columnist Kevin McCullagh:
(http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/is_it_time_to_rethink
_the_t-shaped_designer_17426.asp)
I am forced to read a lot of crap. As a reviewer of submissions to design
journals and conferences, as a juror of design contests, and as a mentor and
advisor to design students and faculty, I read outrageous claims made by
designers who have little understanding of the complexity of the problems they
are attempting to solve or of the standards of evidence required to make
claims. Oftentimes the crap comes from brilliant and talented people, with
good ideas and wonderful instantiations of physical products, concepts, or
simulations. The crap is in the claims.
In the early days of industrial design, the work was primarily focused upon
physical products. Today, however, designers work on organizational structure
and social problems, on interaction, service, and experience design. Many
problems involve complex social and political issues. As a result, designers have
become applied behavioral scientists, but they are woefully undereducated for
the task. Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and
the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes can produce
novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom
implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce
insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable.
Designers often lack the requisite understanding. Design schools do not train
students about these complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of
human and social behavior, about the behavioral sciences, technology, and
business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and
experimental design.
Related problems occur with designers trained in engineering, for although
they may understand hard-core science, they are often ignorant of the so-
called soft areas of social and behavioral sciences. The do not understand
human behavior, chiding people for not using technology properly, asking how
they could be so illogical. (You may have all heard the refrain: “if only we
didn’t have people, our stuff would work just fine,” forgetting that the point of
1 Donald A. Norman. http://www.jnd.org email to: don at jnd.org. Column written for posting at
core77.com
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 2
the work was to help people.) Engineers are often ignorant of how people
actually behave. And both engineers and designers are often ignorant of the
biases that can be unwittingly introduced into experimental designs and the
dangers of inappropriate generalization.
The social and behavioral sciences have their own problems, for they generally
are disdainful of applied, practical work and their experimental methods are
inappropriate: scientists seek “truth” whereas practitioners seek “good
enough.” Scientists look for small differences, whereas designers want large
impact. People in human-computer interaction, cognitive engineering, and
human factors or ergonomics are usually ignorant of design. All disciplines have
their problems: everyone can share the blame.
Time to change design education
Where once industrial designers focused primarily upon form and function,
materials and manufacturing, today’s issues are far more complex and
challenging. New skills are required, especially for such areas as interaction,
experience, and service design. Classical industrial design is a form of applied
art, requiring deep knowledge of forms and materials and skills in sketching,
drawing, and rendering. The new areas are more like applied social and
behavioral sciences and require understanding of human cognition and
emotion, sensory and motor systems, and sufficient knowledge of the scientific
method, statistics and experimental design so that designers can perform valid,
legitimate tests of their ideas before deploying them.
Designers need to deploy microprocessors and displays, actuators and sensors.
Communication modules are being added to more and more products, from the
toaster to the wall switch, the toilet and books (now called e-books).
Knowledge of security and privacy, social networks, and human interaction are
critical. The old skills of drawing and sketching, forming and molding must be
supplemented and in many cases, replaced, by skills in programming,
interaction, and human cognition. Rapid prototyping and user testing are
required, which also means some knowledge of the social and behavior
sciences, of statistics, and of experimental design.
In educational institutions, industrial design is usually housed in schools of art
or architecture, usually taught as a practice with the terminal degree being a
BA, MA, or MFA. It is rare for in design education to have course requirements
in science, mathematics, technology, or the social sciences. As a result the
skills of the designer are not well suited for modern times.
The Uninformed Are Training the Uninformed
My experience with some of the world’s best design schools in Europe, the
United States, and Asia indicate that the students are not well prepared in the
behavioral sciences that are so essential for fields such as interaction and
experience design. They do not understand experimental rigor or the potential
biases that show up when the designer evaluates their own products or even
their own experimental results. Their professors also lack this understanding.
Designers often test their own designs, but with little understanding of
statistics and behavioral variability. They do not know about unconscious biases
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 3
that can cause them to see what they wish to see rather than what actually has
occurred. Many are completely unaware of the necessity of control groups. The
social and behavioral sciences (and medicine) long ago learned the importance
of blind scoring where the person scoring the results does not know what
condition is being observed, nor what is being tested.
The problem is compounded by a new insistence by top research universities
that all design faculty have a PhD degree. But given the limited training of
most design faculty, there is very little understanding of the kind of knowledge
that constitutes a PhD. The uninformed are training the uninformed.
There are many reasons for these difficulties. I’ve already discussed the fact
that most design is taught in schools of art or architecture. Many students take
design because they dislike science, engineering, and mathematics.
Unfortunately, the new demands upon designers do not allow us the luxury of
such non-technical, non science-oriented training.
A different problem is that even were a design school to decide to teach more
formal methods, we don’t really have a curriculum that is appropriate for
designers. Take my concern about the lack of experimental rigor. Suppose you
were to agree with me – what courses would we teach? We don’t really know.
The experimental methods of the social and behavioral sciences are not well
suited for the issues faced by designers.
Designers are practitioners, which means they are not trying to extend the
knowledge base of science but instead, to apply the knowledge. The designer’s
goal is to have large, important impact. Scientists are interested in truth, often
in the distinction between the predictions of two differing theories. The
differences they look for are quite small: often statistically significant but in
terms of applied impact, quite unimportant. Experiments that carefully control
for numerous possible biases and that use large numbers of experimental
observers are inappropriate for designers.
The designer needs results immediately, in hours or at possibly a few days.
Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient. Yes, attention must be
paid to the possible biases (such as experimenter biases and the impact of
order of presentation of tests), but if one is looking for large effect, it should
be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than are used by the
scientific community will suffice. Designs don’t have to be optimal or perfect:
results that are not quite optimum or les than perfect are often completely
satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor need they
be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these pragmatic, applied
goals.
Design needs to develop its own experimental methods. They should be simple
and quick, looking for large phenomena and conditions that are “good enough.”
But they must still be sensitive to statistical variability and experimental
biases. These methods do not exist: we need some sympathetic statisticians to
work with designers to develop these new, appropriate methods.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 4
When Designers Think They Know, But Don’t
Designers fall prey to the two ailments of not knowing what they don’t know
and, worse, thinking they know things they don’t. This last condition is
especially true when it comes to human behavior: the cognitive sciences.
Designers (and engineers) think that they understand human behavior: after
all, they are human and they have observed people all their lives. Alas, they
believe a “naive psychology”: plausible explanations of behavior that have little
or no basis in fact. They confuse the way they would prefer people to behave
with how people actually behave. They are unaware of the large experimental
and theoretical literature, and they are not well versed in statistical
variability.
Real human behavior is very contextual. It is readily biased by multiple factors.
Human behavior is driven by both emotional and cognitive processes, much of
which is subconscious and not accessible to human conscious knowledge. Gaps
and lapses in attention are to be expected. Human memory is subject to
numerous biases and errors. Different memory systems have different
characteristics. Most importantly, human memory is not a calling up of images
of the past but rather a reconstruction of the remembered event. As a result, it
often fits expectations more closely than it fits reality and it is easily modified
by extraneous information.
Many designers are woefully ignorant of the deep complexity of social and
organizational problems. I have seen designers propose simple solutions to
complex problems in education, poverty, crime, and the environment.
Sometimes these suggestions win design prizes (the uniformed judge the
uninformed). Complex problems are complex systems: there is no simple
solution. It is not enough to mean well: one must also have knowledge.
The same problems arise in doing experimental studies of new methods of
interaction, new designs, or new experiences and services. When scientists
(and designers) study people, they too are subject to these same human biases,
and so cognitive scientists carefully design experiments so that the biases of
the experimenter can have no impact on the results or their interpretation. All
these factors are well understood by cognitive scientists, but seldom known or
understood by designers and engineers. Here is a case of not knowing what is
not known.
Why Designers Must Know Some Science
Over the years, the scientific method evolved to create order and evaluation to
otherwise exaggerated claims. Science is not a body of facts, not the use of
mathematics. Rather, the key to science is its procedures, or what is called the
scientific method. The method does not involve white robes and complex
mathematics. The scientific method requires public disclosure of the problem,
the method of approach, the findings, and then the interpretation. This allows
others to repeat the finding: replication is essential. Nothing is accepted in
science until others have been able to repeat the work and come to the same
conclusion. Moreover, scientists have learned to their dismay that conclusions
are readily biased by prior belief, so experimental methods have been devised
to minimize these unintentional biases.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 5
Science is difficult when applied to the physical and biological world. But when
applied to people, the domain of the social sciences, it is especially difficult.
Now subtle biases abound, so careful statistical procedures have been devised
to minimize them. Moreover, scientists have learned not to trust themselves,
so in the social sciences it is sometimes critical to design tests so that neither
the person being studied nor the person doing the study know what condition is
involved – this is called “double blind.”
Designers, on the whole, are quite ignorant of all this science stuff. They like
to examine a problem, devise what seems to be a solution, and then announce
the result for all to acclaim. Contests are held. Prizes are awarded. But wait–
has anyone examined the claims? Tested them to see if they perform as
claimed? Tested them against alternatives (what science calls control groups),
tested them often enough to minimize the impact of statistical variability?
Huh? say the designers: Why, it is obvious – just look – What is all this statistical
crap?
Journals do not help, for most designers are practitioners and seldom publish.
And when they do, I find that the reviewers in many of our design journals and
conferences are themselves ignorant of appropriate experimental procedures
and controls, so even the published work is often of low quality. Design
conferences are particularly bad: I have yet to find a design conference where
the rigor of the peer review process is satisfactory. The only exceptions are
those run by societies from the engineering and sciences, such as the
Computer-Human Interaction and graphics conferences run by the Institute of
Electronic and Electrical Engineers or the Computer Science society (IEEE, ACM
and the CHI and SIGGRAPH conferences). These conferences, however, favor
the researcher, so although they are favorite publication vehicles for design
researchers and workers in interaction design, practitioners often find their
papers rejected. The practice of design lacks a high quality venue for its
efforts.
Design Education Must Change
Service design, interaction design, and experience design are not about the
design of physical objects: they require minimal skills in drawing, knowledge of
materials, or manufacturing. In their place, they require knowledge of the
social sciences, of story construction, of back-stage operations, and of
interaction. We still need classically trained industrial designers: the need for
styling, for forms, for the intelligent use of materials will never go away.
In today’s world of ubiquitous sensors, controllers, motors, and displays, where
the emphasis is on interaction, experience, and service, where designers work
on organizational structure and services as much as on physical products, we
need a new breed of designers. This new breed must know about science and
technology, about people and society, about appropriate methods of validation
of concepts and proposals. They must incorporate knowledge of political issues
and business methods, operations, and marketing. Design education has to
move away from schools of art and architecture and move into the schools of
science and engineering. We need new kinds of designers, people who can work
across disciplines, who understand human beings, business, and technology and
the appropriate means of validating claims.
Don Norman November 26, 2010
Why Design Education Must Change 6
Today’s designers are poorly trained to meet the today’s demands: We need a
new form of design education, one with more rigor, more science, and more
attention to the social and behavioral sciences, to modern technology, and to
business. But we cannot copy the existing courses from those disciplines: we
need to establish new ones that are appropriate to the unique requirements of
the applied requirements of design.
But beware: We must not lose the wonderful, delightful components of design.
The artistic side of design is critical: to provides objects, interactions and
services that delight as well as inform, that are joyful. Designers do need to
know more about science and engineering, but without becoming scientists or
engineers. We must not lose the special talents of designers to make our lives
more pleasurable.
It is time for a change. We, the design community, must lead this change.
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235700801
T ECHNOLOGY
The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other
People’s Problems
STEPHEN LAM / REUTERS
I found Shane Snow’s essay on prison reform — “How Soylent and Oculus Could
Fix the Prison System” — through hate-linking.
Friends of mine hated the piece so much that normally-articulate people were at a
loss for words.
What will it take to design socio-technical systems that actually work?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN JUN 23, 2016
Susie Cagle
@susie_c
A real person thought it would be a good idea to write this and
post it on the Internet.
Susie Cagle @susie_c · Jan 30, 2016
NOPE maneatingrobot.com/96/prison-refo…
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With a recommendation like that, how could I pass it up? And after reading it, I
tweeted my astonishment to Susie, who told me, “I write comics, but I don’t know
how to react to this in a way that’s funny.” I realized that I couldn’t offer an
appropriate reaction in 140 characters either. The more I think about Snow’s essay,
the more it looks like the outline for a class on the pitfalls of solving social
problems with technology, a class I’m now planning on teaching this coming fall.
Using Snow’s essay as a jumping off point, I want to consider a problem that’s been
on my mind a great deal since joining the MIT Media Lab five years ago: How do
we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the
world better, not worse?
In other words, is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest
technology will solve social problems—and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to
offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive, and misguided? Can
we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work
closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical
systems that address hard problems?
Obviously, I think this is possible — if really, really hard — or I wouldn’t be teaching
at an engineering school. But before considering how we overcome a naïve faith in
technology, let’s examine Snow’s suggestion. It’s a textbook example of a solution
that’s technically sophisticated, simple to understand, and dangerously wrong.
* * *
Though he may be best known as co-founder of the content-marketing platform
“Contently,” Shane Snow describes himself as a “journalist, geek and best-selling
author.” That last bit comes from his book Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and
Icons Accelerate Success, which offers insights on how “innovators and icons” can
“rethink convention” and break “rules that are not rules.”
298 2:21 PM – Jan 30, 2016
244 people are talking about this
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That background may help readers understand where Snow is coming from. His
blog is filled with plainspoken and often entertaining explanations of complex
systems followed by apparently straightforward conclusions — evidently, burning
coal and natural gas to generate electricity is a poor idea, so oil companies should
be investing in solar energy. Fair enough.
Some of these explorations are more successful than others. In Snow’s essay about
prison reform, he identifies violence, and particularly prison rape, as the key
problem to be solved, and offers a remedy that he believes will lead to cost savings
for taxpayers as well: all prisoners should be incarcerated in solitary confinement,
fed only Soylent meal replacement drink through slots in the wall, and all
interpersonal interaction and rehabilitative services will be provided in Second Life
using the Oculus Rift virtual reality system. Snow’s system eliminates many
features of prison life — “cell blocks, prison yards, prison gyms, physical
interactions with other prisoners, and so on.” That’s by design, he explains. “Those
are all current conventions in prisons, but history is clear: innovation happens
when we rethink conventions and apply alternative learning or technology to old
problems.”
An early clue that Snow’s rethinking is problematic is that his proposed solution
looks a lot like “administrative segregation,” a technique used in prisons to
separate prisoners who might be violent or disruptive from the general population
by keeping them in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. The main problem with
administrative segregation or with what’s known as the SHU (the “secure housing
unit” in supermax prisons) is that inmates tend to experience serious mental health
problems connected to sustained isolation.
“Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly
suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia,
aggression and depression,” explains the social psychologist Craig Haney in a
paper for the journal Crime & Delinquency. Shaka Senghor, a writer and activist
who was formerly incarcerated for murder, explains that many inmates in solitary
confinement have underlying mental health issues, and the isolation damages
even the sound of mind. Solitary confinement, he says, is “one of the most barbaric
and inhumane aspects of our society.”
Due to the psychological effects of being held in isolation, the UN Special
Rapporteur on Torture has condemned the use of sustained solitary confinement,
and called for a ban on solitary confinement for people under 18 years old. Rafael
Sperry of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility has called forSubscribe for less than $1 per week
architects to stop designing prisons that support solitary confinement—the
argument being that they enable violations of human rights. Snow’s solution may
be innovative, but it’s also a large-scale human rights violation.
Snow and supporters might argue that he’s not trying to deprive prisoners of
human contact, but wants to give them a new, safer form of contact. But there’s
essentially no research on the health effects of sustained exposure to head-
mounted virtual reality.
Would prisoners be forced to choose between simulator sickness or isolation? What
are the long-term effects on vision of immersive VR displays? Will prisoners
experience visual exhaustion through vergence-accommodation, a yet-to-be-
solved problem of eye and brain due to problems focusing on objects that are very
nearby but appear to be distant? Furthermore, will contact with humans through
virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation, or
exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the
restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of
concentration camp prisoners.
How does an apparently intelligent person end up suggesting a solution that might,
at best, constitute unethical medical experiments on prisoners? How does a well-
meaning person suggest a remedy that likely constitutes torture?
* * *
The day I read Snow’s essay, I happened to be leading a workshop on social change
during the Yale Civic Leadership conference. Some of the students I worked with
were part of the movement to rename Yale’s Calhoun College, and all were smart,
thoughtful, creative, and openminded.
The workshop I led encourages thinkers to consider different ways they might
make social change, not just through electing good leaders and passing just laws.
Our lab at MIT examines the idea that changemakers can use different levers of
change, including social norms, market forces, and new technologies to influence
society, and the workshop I led asks students to propose novel solutions to long-
standing problems featuring one of these levers of change. With Snow’s essay in
mind, I asked the students to take on the challenge of prison reform.
Oddly, none of their solutions involved virtual reality isolation cells. In fact, most
of the solutions they proposed had nothing to do with prisons themselves. Instead,
their solutions focused on over-policing of black neighborhoods, America’sSubscribe for less than $1 per week
aggressive prosecutorial culture that encourages those arrested to plead guilty,
legalization of some or all drugs, reform of sentencing guidelines for drug crimes,
reforming parole and probation to reduce re-incarceration for technical offenses,
and building robust re-entry programs to help ex-cons find support, housing, and
gainful employment.
In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s
working on the wrong problem.
Yes, prisons in the United State could be safer and cheaper. But the larger problem
is that the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth. With five
percent of the world’s population, we are responsible for 25 percent of the world’s
prisoners.
Snow may see his ideas as radical and transformative, but they’re fundamentally
conservative — he tinkers with the conditions of confinement without questioning
whether incarceration is how our society should solve problems of crime and
addiction. As a result, his solutions can only address a facet of the problem, not the
deep structural issues that lead to the problem in the first place.
Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving
the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper
problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change.
Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans. They also
avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness,
and structural racism.
* * *
Some of my hate-linking friends began their eye-rolling about Snow’s article with
the title, which references two of Silicon Valley’s most hyped technologies. With
the current focus on the U.S. as an “innovation economy,” it’s common to read
essays predicting the end of a major social problem due to a technical innovation.
Bitcoin will end poverty in the developing world by enabling inexpensive money
transfers. Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child will educate the world’s poor
without need for teachers or schools. Self driving cars will obviate public transport
and reshape American cities.
The writer Evgeny Morozov has offered a sharp and helpful critique to this mode of
thinking, which he calls “solutionism.” Solutionism demands that we focus on
problems that have “nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” In hisSubscribe for less than $1 per week
book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov savages ideas like Snow’s, regardless
of whether they are meant as thought experiments or serious policy proposals.
(Indeed, one worry I have in writing this essay is taking Snow’s ideas too seriously,
as Morozov does with many of the ideas he lambastes in his book.)
The problem with the solutionist critique, though, is that it tends to remove
technological innovation from the problem-solver’s toolkit. In fact, technological
development is often a key component in solving complex social and political
problems, and new technologies can sometimes open a previously intractable
problem. The rise of inexpensive solar panels may be an opportunity to move
nations away from a dependency on fossil fuels and begin lowering atmospheric
levels of carbon dioxide, much as developments in natural gas extraction and
transport technologies have lessened the use of dirtier fuels like coal.
But it’s rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself.
Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require
changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale.
I installed solar panels on the roof of my house last fall. Rapid advances in panel
technology made this a routine investment instead of a luxury, and the existence of
competitive solar installers in our area meant that market pressures kept costs low.
But the panels were ultimately affordable because federal and state legislation
offered tax rebates for their purchase, and because Massachusetts state law
rewards me with solar credits for each megawatt I produce—which I can sell to
utilities through an online marketplace because energy companies are legally
mandated to produce a percentage of their total power output via solar generation.
And while there are powerful technological, economic, and legal forces pushing us
toward solar energy, the most powerful driver may be the social, normative
pressure of seeing our neighbors install solar panels—leaving us feeling like we
weren’t doing our part.
My Yale students who tried to use technology as their primary lever for reforming
U.S. prisons had a difficult time. One team offered the idea of an online social
network that would help recently released prisoners connect with other ex-
offenders to find support, advice, and job opportunities in the outside world.
Another looked at the success of Bard College’s remarkable program to help
inmates earn bachelor’s degrees, and wondered whether online learning
technologies could allow similar efforts to reach thousands more prisoners. But
many of the other promising ideas that arose in our workshops had a technological
component — given the ubiquity of mobile phones, why can’t ex-offenders haveSubscribe for less than $1 per week
their primary contact with their parole officers via mobile phones? And given the
rise of big-data techniques used for “smart policing,” can we better review patterns
of policing—including identifying and eliminating cases where officers are over-
focusing on some communities?
The temptation of technology is that it promises fast and neat solutions to social
problems. It usually fails to deliver. The problem with Morozov’s critique, though,
is that technological solutions, combined with other paths to change, can
sometimes turn intractable problems into solvable ones. The key is to understand
technology’s role as a lever of change in conjunction with complementary levers.
* * *
Shane Snow introduces his essay on prison reform not with statistics about the
ineffectiveness of incarceration in reducing crime, but with his fear of being sent to
prison. Specifically, he fears prison rape, a serious problem which he radically
overestimates: “My fear of prison also stems from the fact that some 21 percent of
U.S. prison inmates get raped or coerced into giving sexual favors to terrifying
dudes named Igor.” Snow is religious about footnoting his essays, but not as good
at reading the sources he cites — the report he uses to justify his fear of “Igor” (nice
job avoiding accusations of overt racism there, Shane) indicates that 2.91 of 1,000
incarcerated persons experienced sexual violence, or 0.291 percent, not 21 percent.
Perhaps for Snow, isolation for years at a time, living vicariously through a VR
headset while sipping an oat flour smoothie would be preferable to time in the
prison yard, mess hall, workshop, or classroom. But there’s no indication that Snow
has talked to any current or ex-offenders about their time in prison, or about the
ways in which encounters with other prisoners led them to faith, to mentorship, or
to personal transformation.
The people Shane imagines are so scary, so other, that he can’t imagine interacting
with them, learning from them, or anything but being violently assaulted by them.
No wonder he doesn’t bother to ask what aspects of prison life are most and least
livable, and which would benefit most from transformation.
Much of my work focuses on how technologies spread across national, religious
and cultural borders, and how they are transformed by that spread. Cellphone
networks believed that pre-paid scratch cards were an efficient way to sell phone
minutes at low cost — until Ugandans started using the scratch off codes to send
money via text message in a system called Sente, inventing practical mobile money
in the process. Facebook believes its service is best used by real individuals usingSubscribe for less than $1 per week
their real names, and goes to great lengths to remove accounts it believes to be
fictional. But when Facebook comes to a country like Myanmar, where it is seen as
a news service, not a social networking service, phone shops specializing in setting
up accounts using fake names and phone numbers render Facebook’s preferences
null and void.
Smart technologists and designers have learned that their preferences are seldom
their users’ preferences, and companies like Intel now employ brilliant
ethnographers to discover how tools are used by actual users in their homes and
offices. Understanding the wants and needs of users is important when you’re
designing technologies for people much like yourself, but it’s utterly critical when
designing for people with different backgrounds, experiences, wants, and needs.
Given that Snow’s understanding of prison life seems to come solely from binge-
watching Oz, it’s virtually guaranteed that his proposed solution will fail in
unanticipated ways when used by real people.
* * *
Of the many wise things my Yale students said during our workshop was a student
who wondered if he should be participating at all. “I don’t know anything about
prisons, I don’t have family in prison. I don’t know if I understand these problems
well enough to solve them, and I don’t know if these problems are mine to solve.”
Talking about the workshop with my friend and colleague Chelsea Barabas, she
asked the wonderfully deep question, “Is it ever okay to solve another person’s
problem?”
On its surface, the question looks easy to answer. We can’t ask infants to solve
problems of infant mortality, and by extension, it seems unwise to let kindergarten
students design educational policy or demand that the severely disabled design
their own assistive technologies.
But the argument is more complicated when you consider it more closely. It’s
difficult if not impossible to design a great assistive technology without working
closely, iteratively, and cooperatively with the person who will wear or use it. My
colleague Hugh Herr designs cutting-edge prostheses for U.S. veterans who’ve lost
legs, and the centerpiece of his lab is a treadmill where amputees test his limbs,
giving him and his students feedback about what works, what doesn’t, and what
needs to change. Without the active collaboration with the people he’s trying to
help, he’s unable to make technological advances.
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Disability rights activists have demanded “nothing about us without us,” a slogan
that demands that policies should not be developed without the participation of
those intended to benefit from those policies.
Design philosophies like participatory design and codesign bring this concept to
the world of technology, demanding that technologies designed for a group of
people be designed and built, in part, by those people. Codesign challenges many
of the assumptions of engineering, requiring people who are used to working in
isolation to build broad teams and to understand that those most qualified to offer
a technical solution may be least qualified to identify a need or articulate a design
problem. This method is hard and frustrating, but it’s also one of the best ways to
ensure that you’re solving the right problem, rather than imposing your preferred
solution on a situation.
On the other pole from codesign is an approach to engineering we might
understand as “Make things better by making better things.” This school of
thought argues that while mobile phones were designed for rich westerners, not for
users in developing nations, they’ve become one of the transformative
technologies for the developing world. Frustratingly, this argument is valid, too.
Many of the technologies we benefit from weren’t designed for their ultimate
beneficiaries, but were simply designed well and adopted widely. Shane Snow’s
proposal is built in part on this perspective — Soylent was designed for geeks who
wanted to skip meals, not for prisoners in solitary confinement, but perhaps it
might be preferable to Nutraloaf or other horrors of the prison kitchen.
I’m not sure how we resolve the dichotomy of “with us” versus “better things.” I’d
note that every engineer I’ve ever met believes what she’s building is a better thing.
As a result, strategies that depend on finding the optimum solutions often rely on
choice-rich markets where users can gravitate towards the best solution. In other
words, they don’t work very well in an environment like prison, where prisoners are
unlikely to be given a choice between Snow’s isolation cells and the prison as it
currently stands, and are even less likely to participate in designing a better prison.
Am I advocating codesign of prisons with the currently incarcerated? Hell yeah, I
am. And with ex-offenders, corrections officers, families of prisoners, as well as the
experts who design these facilities today. They’re likely to do a better job than
smart Yale students, or technology commentators.
* * *
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It is unlikely that anyone is going to invite Shane Snow to redesign a major prison
any time soon, so spending more than 3,000 words urging you to reject his solution
may be a waste of your time and mine. But the mistakes Snow makes are those that
engineers make all the time when they turn their energy and creativity to solving
pressing and persistent social problems. Looking closely at how Snow’s solutions
fall short offers some hope for building better, fairer, and saner solutions.
The challenge, unfortunately, is not in offering a critique of how solutions go
wrong. Excellent versions of that critique exist, from Morozov’s war on
solutionism, to Courtney Martin’s brilliant “The Reductive Seduction of Other
People’s Problems.” If it’s easy to design inappropriate solutions about problems
you don’t fully understand, it’s not much harder to criticize the inadequacy of those
solutions.
What’s hard is synthesis — learning to use technology as part of well-designed
sociotechnical solutions. These solutions sometimes require profound advances in
technology. But they virtually always require people to build complex,
multifunctional teams that work with and learn from the people the technology is
supposed to benefit.
Three students at the MIT Media Lab taught a course last semester called
“Unpacking Impact: Reflecting as We Make.” They point out that the Media Lab
prides itself on teaching students how to make anything, and how to turn what you
make into a business, but rarely teaches reflection about what we make and what it
might mean for society as a whole. My experience with teaching this reflective
process to engineers is that it’s both important and potentially paralyzing, that
once we understand the incompleteness of technology as a path for solving
problems and the ways technological solutions relate to social, market, and legal
forces, it can be hard to build anything at all.
I’m going to teach a new course this fall, tentatively titled “Technology and Social
Change.” It’s going to include an examination of the four levers of social change
Larry Lessig suggests in Code, and which I’ve been exploring as possible paths to
civic engagement. The course will include deep methodological dives into
codesign, and will examine using anthropology as tool for understanding user
needs. It will look at unintended consequences, cases where technology’s best
intentions fail, and cases where careful exploration and preparation led to
technosocial systems that make users and communities more powerful than they
were before.
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I’m “calling my shot” here for two reasons. One, by announcing it publicly, I’m less
likely to back out of it, and given how hard these problems are, backing out is a real
possibility. And two, if you’ve read this far in this post, you’ve likely thought about
this issue and have suggestions for what we should read and what exercises we
should try in the course of the class — I hope you might be kind enough to share
those with me.
In the end, I’m grateful for Shane Snow’s surreal, Black Mirror vision of the future
prison both because it’s a helpful jumping-off point for understanding how hard it
is to make change well by using technology, and because the U.S. prison system is a
broken and dysfunctional system in need of change. But we need to find ways to
disrupt better, to challenge knowledgeably, to bring the people they hope to benefit
into the process. If you can, please help me figure out how we teach these ideas to
the smart, creative people I work with—people who want to change the world, and
are afraid of breaking it in the process.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write
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